The potential that once hung so heady in the sun-warmed solstice air is no more.

Just another year waiting on Hot Girl Summer.

Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion popularized the phrase “hot girl summer” before COVID, releasing a 2019 song of the same name that became her first No. 1 hit. Of its meaning, she told the Root, “It’s about women and men being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you.” In other words, a summer where you can be in charge of your own happiness.

The word “hot” has proven elastic in the English language over the centuries. Its use as a way to communicate attraction and desire goes all the way back to Chaucer and Shakespeare. But its incorporation as slang is relatively recent; in print, at least, the Oxford English Dictionary dates its use back to a 1926 New Republic article, which reminds us—if we’ve “forgotten” our mythology—that Aphrodite was the “hot momma of goddesses.” By the time Paris Hilton started designating everything from velour tracksuits to the earth “hot” in the early 2000s, the nimbleness of hotness was increasingly apparent, though it was still up to tastemakers to determine its parameters.

With Megan Thee Stallion’s latest popularization of “hot,” though, the boundaries of the word were reframed once again. No longer is it only a label that someone can slap on you—instead, her vision of a “hot girl” is anyone’s mantle to claim. The writer Danya Issawi called attention to this phenomenon in the New York Times recently: “Hotness is no longer just in the eye of the beholder,” Issawi observed. “It’s a mood. It’s a vibe.”

In this context, the phenomenon of doing hot girl things, which has taken off across social media, can be as mundane as going for a walk or doing your taxes. The emphasis is entirely on how you do them—and how you feel doing them—which is why, for instance, it’s been used as a way to destigmatize mental and physical ailments. Can hot girls have IBS? (Of course.) Depression? (Who doesn’t in this day and age.)

But if being a hot girl is a self-affirming act that you as an individual can manifest, I’ve come to think of Hot Girl Summer as a collective societal pact. Amid the sorrows, horrors, and existential crises of the modern life, Hot Girl Summer has felt like the promise of a better world that we can build together.

Which is why, for the past two years, the idea of Hot Girl Summer—née “Hot Vax Summer” in 2021, and this year’s “Hot Girl Summer 2.0” or “‘Hot Vax Summer,’ but for real this time” (emphasis my own)—has loomed so large in the collective imagination.

Like Charlie Brown revving up to kick the prodigal football each Memorial Day, I’ve held my breath, watching that sun-kissed horizon. Maybe this is the summer we’ve been anticipating, the summer it will all happen—only for a new avalanche of horrors to tumble out.

Looking at it from the other side of Labor Day this year, I think I’ve finally realized what it is that we’ve been talking about when we talk about Hot Girl Summer. And why it will never truly manifest. Hot Girl Summer is utopia. What we hope for, and then mourn as we slide into September, is a different reality.

Throughout the ages and across the globe, people have always expressed this longing for another, better world.

“Utopian vision invariably presents itself as a social commentary, an allegory of the desire for change and transformation,” wrote the scholar Longxi Zhang in the academic journal Utopian Studies. This desire, Zhang points out, is “deeply ingrained in the very nature of the human condition, as no one in any society is unwilling, if not actively trying, to make life better and achieve the optimum out of our limited resources and capabilities.”

When Thomas More wrote his socio-political satire Utopia just over 500 years ago in 1516, he gave us a word for this hope. But while it’s often said that he was pulling from the Greek word ou-topos or “no place,” More was actually playing on the Greek word eu-topos or “a good place.” As the British Library points out, “at the very heart of the word is a vital question: can a perfect world ever be realized?”

But I’d argue that question has always been moot.

Even if a utopia—or a Hot Girl Summer—isn’t possible, it doesn’t mean we can’t all work toward it to the best of our ability. And do so unapologetically, as I think Megan Thee Stallion would argue.

After all, the most important thing to remember about utopias is that they are always a state of pursuit.

The Uruguayan literary master Eduardo Galeano put it most beautifully when he wrote: “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”

From the other side of the calendar, Hot Girl Summer, too, beckons us forward, a coconut-scented siren call of what could be.

The post Hot Girl Summer Is a Utopian Notion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First, I learned that I would never inherit the smooth drape of my grandmother’s skin. Like my father, I would battle hillocks and mounds of acne pushing up against my face well into adulthood.

Second, and more important, I would come to learn that my home was a forest at the edge of the sea.

In the same year, 1998, I moved into a decrepit bungalow situated within the world headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Chennai, India. The sprawling, 260-acre ecological heritage site sits on the mouth of the Adyar River, where its brackish currents swirl into the Bay of Bengal. Punctuated with neoclassical colonial houses, floating trilithon archways, and cantonment-style hostel dwellings for visitors, the international campus of the Society has largely stood unchanged since its inception.

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian occultist; William Quan Judge, an Irish American lawyer; and Henry Steel Olcott, an American military officer. With visions in their mouths, they raised paeans to universal brotherhood, comparative religion, and the unexplained edicts of nature.

In their quest for self-actualization, they may have seen the face of utopia in the peninsular balminess of South India, worlds away from the industrialized West. Hallucinatory revelations and prophecies were said to have informed Blavatsky’s decision to establish the Society’s headquarters within the teeming sprawl of the Madras Presidency, as the region was known under British control. Perhaps the same tides of providence or fate steered my family toward the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky’s bungalow. Courtesy of the author.

An ill-timed home renovation and a sudden work project sent my father out of Chennai for the foreseeable future. My maternal grandmother and my mother began to piece together the remnants of his plans, as always. They soon realized that we would have nowhere to stay while our apartment was being pulled apart at the seams.

My mother’s relatives were sparse but reliable. In duress or otherwise, uncles, aunts, and second cousins unfailingly materialized out of the ether when summoned. After my grandfather passed away, his brother—my granduncle—took on the mantle of honorary parent and grandparent to his nieces and nephews, and their children as well.

Half-remembered rumors of conspiracies eddied around my granduncle’s nomadic history. My grandmother ventured that he had spent a few years in West Bengal after his wife’s death over a decade ago, as a mendicant associated with the Ramakrishna Mission. An aunt put an end to that theory, sneering that my granduncle had actually been a toiling bookkeeper in Kolkata, that even he could not escape the drudgery of unpaid bills and unfed mouths. But one fact was indisputable above all else—that he had returned to Chennai as an avowed Theosophist, living and working in the Society ever since.

On a Sunday afternoon, my mother broke the news of our imminent homelessness to him over the phone.

Just come, my granduncle said. I have room.

A week later, we were a tableau of women arrayed at his doorstep—my grandmother, my mother, my teenage self, and my baby sister. On our arrival, we realized that his words were literal: He had prepared a single room for all of us.

The room was cavernous, with a vast, distant ceiling and spectral corners that we could fade into. Four cots topped with gauzy mosquito nets sat along the walls. The only other piece of furniture in the space was a rosewood clotheshorse, more appealing than functional, with its improbable curves and its improbable arches that would not hold a shirt. A banded gecko chirped at us from a high window, as if to say hello.

From that day onward, I was neatly incorporated into my granduncle’s routine. He was a great believer in youngsters, as he termed anyone under the age of 60. Having lived and fought through the Indian Freedom struggle, he believed that the spark to my ennui-dulled youth was the slag of discipline, and so he declared that I would begin the day during brahma muhurta, the hour of creation before sunrise. My mother and my grandmother enthusiastically agreed.

Every morning at 5 a.m., he would wait for me by the front door with his Atlas bicycle. I was always late and always disheveled in my school uniform, a marked contrast to his immaculate presence—from the elaborate folds of his panchakacham veshti that fell down to his ankles just so, to the planes of his kurta, to the swoop of his nose, to his baldpate ringed with silver hair, to his level eyes and level hands.

Good, let’s go, he would say, without a hint of impatience in his voice. Our first stop was always the cannonball tree, a swathe of fragrant, sacred flowers blanketing its trunk in hooded splashes of fleshy oranges and yellows. Nagapushpam, he had pointed out once. The flower that resembles the hood of a snake.

Further on, the pathway was littered with curling knots of rosary-pea pods, their red seeds crunching under our feet. We’d pass by the bodhi tree—hunched over a pond covered in a scrim of pale nymphaea lotuses, grown from a sapling of the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. At the far edge of the water, a miniature shrine housed a sandstone image of Gautama Buddha, his hands arranged in the dharmachakra mudra—setting into motion the wheels of dharma itself.

Pick two lotuses, my granduncle instructed. Don’t disturb the tadpoles.

We threw ourselves into the bustle of preparing the shrine for its morning rituals—sweeping the floor and around its perimeter, divesting the ceremonial lamp of any residual soot, daubing the sandstone Buddha with a soft cloth. Once done, my granduncle beckoned for the flowers. I handed them to him, and he laid them reverently at the Buddha’s feet. We stood there in silence for about a minute or so. He laughed when I began fidgeting, as if on cue. Okay ma, this is too quiet for youngsters like you.

That was my escape signal, clear as a shot, and I would yell my goodbyes as I ran around the pond. My granduncle would continue his morning rituals and ablutions at the Bharata Samaj Hindu temple elsewhere on the Society’s campus, and then volunteer his services at whatever office sought his assistance for the day—the in-house printing press, the bookshop, or the garden department.

Banyan tree at the Theosophical Society. Courtesy of the author.

I used this slim packet of time to explore the Society on my own. At the Zoroastrian temple, I would whisper good morning against the ears of a pair of Assyrian winged lamassu with bearded faces. I passed the great banyan tree that continued to live and breathe across its aerial-root-sprawl of 40,000 square feet, thriving willfully even after its original trunk was destroyed in a cyclone. At the forking dirt road, I took the path on the left, through an orange copse of silk-cotton trees, past chambers that housed guests and nascent Theosophist seekers from all over the world. Another mud fork took me deeper into the forest, through a thicket of copperpods with their yellow plumes and along the Adyar River, as packs of robber crabs skittered into the estuary.

At last, I would reach a tiny gate, flush against a stone wall that opened out to the bay.

The gate’s watchman had been informed through the Society’s inimitable network that I was not to be questioned. This gate will always be open for you ma, he said one day. I know whose paethi, whose granddaughter, you are. On hearing the watchman’s words, I realized that my granduncle had quietly retraced the topography of our relationship, drawing our family closer together even as he moved, ever aloof, outside the domestic bounds that roped around the rest of us. The word paethi bumped against my throat as I stood on the empty shore. Sunlight surged across the waves: It was time to head to school.

Days and months melted into each other. I craved the frenetic blur of the city—cram schools and festivals and dance recitals, afternoons at the beach with friends, sneaking into concerts on the Indian Institute of Technology’s campus, or even just watching cable television, which had not made its way through the Society’s gates.

And yet. It had also been a struggle to keep up with my classmates, with their shifting gauges of popularity that were mostly elusive to me. Every night, as I lay beneath the translucent folds of the mosquito net, the ineffable sounds of the nocturnal jungle and the Adyar River rippling under it all, I took refuge in the comforting mantle of the Society’s forested darkness.

One morning, my granduncle pointed to the cannonball tree. It had begun to spew a profusion of perfectly spherical fruits. Picking up a grayish-brown orb from the ground, he cracked it open. Its flesh was cloudy and whorled with deep blues, the color of nightfall. It smells very bad, but it is antibacterial, he said. It is medicine.

The fourth president of the Theosophical Society, Curuppumullage Jinarājadāsa of Sri Lanka, wrote, “Just as an individual organism is one unit in a larger group, so also is the life within each organism a unit in a larger group called a group-soul.” My 14-year-old self would have scoffed at the notion of a group-soul. But in that eyelet of time, with the graying murk of dawn and the smelly cannonball fruit and the form of my granduncle silhouetted against the trees, it seemed as though Jinarājadāsa had been right.

Perhaps I was on the threshold of something immense, a pieced-together whole—even if just for a moment.

The post My Adolescence in an Attempted Utopia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With this neologism, Hofer was describing the deep melancholy—a “wasting disease”—of students and soldiers, “principally young people and adolescents sent to foreign regions.” These fledgling travelers wandered international campuses, landscapes, and cultures, encountering new experiences that changed how they viewed the world.

Like so many college freshmen today, sometimes they got homesick, wishing for some semblance of stability and normality amongst a tumult of new things and ideas. But even when they returned home (nostos, in the Greek) they were often confronted by the painful (algos) realization that they could never really go home again. Because things had changed.

Most contemporary accounts of nostalgia forget these origins. Instead, nostalgia conjures images of wistful old men: “Back in my day …” Sometimes it’s imagined as tyrannical, circulating repressive pasts (e.g. President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” jingoism). Or it’s trivialized as spinning the muddy wheels of pop culture (endless film remakes and BuzzFeed listicles recounting “28 Things That’ll Make Every ’90s Kids Say, ‘Wait, I Had That In My House Too!’”).

Often, nostalgia is mocked, as in this commercial for the Cree LED light bulb: “The light bulbs in your house were invented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Now think about that with your 2013 brain. Do you still do the wash down by the crick while your eldest son keeps lookout for wolves? No. You don’t. This is a Cree LED bulb. It lasts 25 times longer. Nostalgia is dumb.”

Seen this way, nostalgia is stupid, regressive, stuck in the muck. And yet ingenious potentials sprout from that grime if we only think back to the transformed horizons of Hofer’s intrepid young travelers. Their stories remind us that nostalgia is often about change.

In fact, most contemporary social psychologists argue that nostalgia isn’t just the homesickness that Hofer depicts. It’s the full balancing act people perform when they are faced with instability and must consider their past, their present, and their future possibilities.

Whether switching jobs, confronting political turmoil, or traveling abroad to study, people facing existential flux look back to secure ideal pasts and the identities therein. In this light, true nostalgia is a tool of wellbeing. It’s also omni-temporal. That is, nostalgia is simultaneously a pride for the past, a feeling of loss in the present, and a hopeful longing to recover an ideal future.

My work over the last decade has focused on the final link of this chain—the recovery of lost futures. I’ve unearthed the ways designers (from computer programmers who knit to ER physicians who negotiate patients’ values) have communed with nostalgia, wandering through the ashes of lost ideals, traditions, and timelines in order to forge better futures. Such nostalgic design inspires creativity because it provides opportunities for innovators to question the inevitability of the current form of things and to explore alternative ideal pasts and the new futures that might stem from them.

Let me give you some examples:

In 2013, the cloud platform Heroku held its Waza developer conference in San Francisco. Waza, Japanese for art and technique, featured the typical motivational talks, demonstrations of novel coding methods, and philosophical musings on new kinds of programming. But the event also juxtaposed these high-tech discussions with hands-on sessions of nostalgic making.

Participants communed at tables across the San Francisco Design Center and learned from experts at origami, quilting, woodblock printing, book binding. Attendees, that is, were invited to wander nostalgically through the creative making of the past.

“Why do we care about crafts?” Heroku COO Oren Teich asked in his opening address. “Because I want you to be thinking not just about ‘how do I write the best line of code,’ but ‘how do I open myself up to world of what’s possible.’ … If you’re just working with what you know, you have a very narrow view of the world, but if you can look at origami or printmaking, you’re going to be a better programmer.”

Essentially, Teich was priming his audience to use longing for the slow care of handicraft to rupture their everyday fast-tech beliefs and see their programming in a fresh light. Innovation + tradition = revolution.

Though this formula may seem lofty—and Teich’s conference might sound like empty Silicon Valley bullshit—such ruptures have often borne ingenious fruit. We could ask, for instance, what if traditions of Japanese origami had transformed aerospace engineering in the 21st century?

We don’t have to look too far for an answer; the career of physicist Robert J. Lang illustrates such a trajectory. Lang, who has experimented with origami since age 6, received a PhD in applied physics and then worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Plying an origami-based nostalgic design, he then consulted with the German manufacturer EASi to make a better folded airbag and collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on folding a football-field sized telescope into a small rocket.

But such nostalgic design works both ways. Lang has also used his mathematical know-how to transform traditional origami, becoming a world-renowned master for his intricate works from scaled fish to cuckoo clocks. His ability to hold tradition and innovation in his mind simultaneously, each sculpting the other, makes him a virtuoso of both.

Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina’s groundbreaking work on non-Euclidean geometry is a similar example of the power of nostalgic design. For almost two centuries, mathematicians struggled to find ways to model the abstract concept of non-Euclidean hyperbolic space. But it wasn’t until 1997 that Taimina had a eureka moment: she could use crochet to craft durable non-linear planes. Taimina’s crochet (now housed at the Smithsonian) allowed students to touch a form of mathematics they previously could only picture in their heads; it sparked interest in geometry in female fiber artists across the world; and it highlighted the systematic exclusion of women’s ways of knowing from the sciences.

Mathematician Daina Taimina with her non-Euclidean crocheted organisms. Courtesy of Tom Wynne.

This last point shouldn’t be underestimated. Nostalgic designers like Taimina, Lang, and Teich are driven by listening for lost, undervalued, and excluded peoples’ ideals. We might call this a neostalgic ethic, longing for futures that could have been. Along this path, nostalgia becomes a form of expertise: the ability to creatively navigate an adaptable repertoire of temporal lifeworlds (craft and coding, origami and engineering, geometry and fiber art) rather than keeping them artificially separate.

In contrast to such temporal adaptability, one of the core models of innovation over the last 40 years has been Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations curve, which charts who adopts new tech, why they do it, and what designers can learn from them. Rogers calls his ideal users “innovators” and “early adopters”—the bleeding edge consumers who experiment with the latest tech, influence others to purchase it, and give feedback on changes that might make it better. Inventors listen to early adopters incredibly carefully.

But there’s another set of users who are ignored in this model: those citizens Rogers bluntly labels “laggards,” whose decisions not to adopt shiny new tech “are often made in terms of what has been done in previous generations.” By overlooking these people—a population who often can be a combination of working-class, older, disabled, or minority users—innovators leave the transformative worldviews of innumerous peoples and cultures on the cutting room floor. Such a model excludes a huge swath of the population from the future.

Conversely, Taimina, Lang, and Teich each embody not only the benefits of nostalgic design but also the cross-cultural interlacing of ideal traditions and innovations. Preferably, such layering puts disparate communities, cultures, and peoples directly into conversation.

Take the rise of makerspaces in U.S. middle school and high school libraries. As reported by the School Library Journal, “About three-quarters of librarians overall say they coordinate maker activities with other teachers.” As these high-tech spaces proliferate, however, the traditional “makerspaces” of the public school—woodshop, autoshop, and trade programs—are fading. In California, for instance, three-quarters of high school shop programs have disappeared since the 1980s.

By the logic of nostalgic design, rather than replacing autoshops with maker labs, we would do better to host them in the same space, layering innovation and tradition. And, as Taimina’s crochet work hints, we might add a Home Ec lab for good measure.

The value of these merged spaces would lie less in the equipment (technology goes out of date so quickly) and more in the collaborations among people there and the social bridges built as a result. The networks of cross-cultural friendship, giving, and trust that could emanate from such places are increasingly important in an era where digital echo chambers and political filter bubbles breed ideological isolation.

We need spaces where different people from different traditions can wander, wonder, and work together to produce different thinking. This is innovation. This is how we use tradition to rupture our way into the future.

“Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, a cure,” wrote the late Svetlana Boym, the artist, playwright, novelist, and Harvard comparative literature professor, who launched contemporary nostalgia studies. “But it is up to us to take responsibility for our nostalgia and not let others ‘prefabricate’ it for us.”

It’s up to all of us, that is, to use the past to wander into new futures.

The post Nostalgia’s Ingenious Potential appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.